So, imagine my surprise and delight when I learnt that an interview I gave to Sarah Lyall of the New York Times during the 2010 general election campaign had inspired a poem about politics. Of the leaders’ debates I claimed viewers were likely to regard politicians performing on television in the same way they looked on protagonists in fictional dramas. ‘It’s not that they confuse them with TV characters’, I said, ‘but that they see them in the same framework. The leaders’ debates exaggerate that by encouraging voters to focus on the minutiae rather than the policy’.

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According to Simon Heffer, those aspiring to lead the Labour party are ‘not even fighting the last election, but rather the one in 1945’. Heffer, an infamous reactionary, cited Clement Attlee’s victory to establish Labour’s irrelevance to 2015. To his eyes, Labour’s victory occurred in a very different country, one that ‘still had a substantial […]

This is the draft conclusion to my analysis of Labour's campaign, for a special edition of Parliamentary Affairs and the Oxford University Press book Britain Votes 2015. Labour lost the 2015 general election because it failed to convince enough English voters it could manage the economy better than the Conservatives and was led by someone […]

At the start of the 2015 election campaign David Cameron revealed to Daily Telegraph readers that he liked war films and in particular A Bridge Too Far. As someone who has spent a fair share of my time watching films about World War Two, hoping to find what they tell us about the past they depict […]

In one corner, the old school pro, whose reputation precedes them and who can do no more than repeat their long-established, hammy, act. In the other, a plucky outsider many ridicule for being amateurish and simply not up to the job. But enough of Jeremy Paxman and Kay Burley, who hosted The Battle for Number […]

When I wrote A State of Play. British Politics on the Screen, Stage and Page, From Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It I didn’t deliberately seek out fictions with a Manchester or Salford connection. But when I started to see if I could construct a talk for the Post Box in what even the Guardian refers […]